Distributed Systems Software Engineer

Hi! We’re Radix. We’re building the next revolution of scientific tools so scientists can spend more time doing what they do best: science. Right now, scientists with PhDs and years of experience spend literal hours every day copying and pasting data in Excel and manually pipetting. We think this is a problem and we’d rather they got that time back so they could put more time into important scientific discoveries like curing cancer, alzheimers, and even rare genetic conditions. Radix brings to biology a framework and a set of tools much like the tools for CAD/CAM/CAE or VLSI Design.

The biggest roadblocks biologists face today aren’t scientific, they’re operational. They’re about the sheer scale and complexity of making labs work properly. Increasing combinatorial complexity, choppy data flows, awkward equipment integration and poor software compatibility are all holding scientists–and discovery–back. We’re solving these problems and doing it by making a compiler, operating system, and programming language for the computer architecture of the modern biology lab.

We’re a diverse and merry band of nerds, hackers, and cat affectionados. If you work for us, you won't be the only woman, non-binary or trans person, POC, Latino/a/x, non-US citizen, wearer of silly hats, or cat! A key commonality is that we love working with our smart, passionate teammates and customers and that we’re dedicated to improving biologists’ day to day, especially when it means solving hard problems in CS. We also like mechanical keyboards and interesting programming languages a lot. More than is remotely reasonable.

We’re making progress every day towards dramatically improving scientists day to day. Our products delight our clients who are able to do much more with the help of our software and are able to stop doing the boring mechanics that they hate. We strive to make practical, pragmatic steps towards useful solutions that’ll let our customers. Sounds like the sort of team you’d like to be a part of?

Key skills:

These are not requirements. If you think you have adjacent skills, have done a few of the things listed, or would enjoy similar work, please apply!

‍● Strong critical thinking, debugging, and causal reasoning skills

● Experience with functional and object oriented programming or a strong desire and demonstrated capacity to learn

● Experience writing code to implement, configure, and deploy distributed systems--we use Hashicorp tools, especially Consul, Nomad, Terraform, and Vault

● Experience working with fail-safe distributed actor systems, microservices, and streams--we use Akka and Apache Kafka

● Think working with networking is fun or at least tolerable, even fixing DNS issues

● Experience tracking down annoying, hard to find, and arcane software bugs

● Keen to learn and collaborative

● Experience with GNU/Linux (we work in Linux) and Git for version control

● Strong and diverse general knowledge about computers, distributed systems, networking, and/or build systems. We’d love to hear about your esoteric bugs and decisions you wish you’d made differently

Nice to have:

● Have worked with setting up and running CI/CD pipelines, ideally on GitHub or GitLab

● Have experience in corporate computing environments or working with corporate IT departments to get software systems set up and working

● Have done some things in a bio lab or think this sounds cool

● Interested in or have experience with interpreters, compilers, and/or run-time systems—either professionally, as a hobby, or as a curiosity, constraint based SMT solvers, implementing heuristics and metaheuristics, NP complete solution implementations, data analysis, traveling salesman problems, reinforcement learning, or implementing complex math in code

● Human factors, user centered, or general design exposure

Radix is an exciting work environment. We care about each other. We’re also LGBTQ+, polyamory, kink, gender, minority, and most other things supporting. We're an enthusiastic equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.